


Breaking Point

by Quinacridone



Series: Lessons in Being A Good Uncle (By one Perry Fletcher) [3]
Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Angst, Character Study-ish, Gen, Human Perry the Platypus (Phineas and Ferb), PTSD, Perry's past, Physical Torture, Pre-Canon, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Torture, Trauma, Very much intense, Violence, depression mentioned in a roundabout way, mental health mentioned in a roundabout way, traumatic pasts, tw torture, tw violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:47:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21737821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinacridone/pseuds/Quinacridone
Summary: Perrin Fletcher had not been broken by the Military.Neither had training to be a spy broken him, despite the bruises and sore muscles.Loneliness had been the final hit. The final part of a series of wieghts, dragging him deeper and deeper into emptiness.Maybe that had been his breaking point.
Series: Lessons in Being A Good Uncle (By one Perry Fletcher) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1564906
Comments: 8
Kudos: 207





	Breaking Point

**Author's Note:**

> So solid trigger warning on this one. It is not a fun fic. I'm not exactly known for being light on description and this fic is no different. If you are sensitive to themes of torture (mental and psychological), trauma, depression and PTSD, please do not read it. This is mostly just a backstory piece to fill out my Human!Perry adaption. There are going to be other fics that are far more relevant to the very rough plot of this series. 
> 
> Seriously. Please read with caution. If it becomes too much, don't force yourself to continue.

Perrin wondered, sometimes, if there was such a thing as a god. And if so, what he'd done to anger him so much. 

His life had always been a big of a spiral. He'd always been a bit of a strange kid. A distant kid. Disconnected. Uninvolved.

The military hadn't broken him.

For all his family knew, it had. The shoulder injury that had gotten him discharged, the one he'd gotten saving a teammates life- it left a physical scar. One that ran from the left shoulder over his back, down to the blade, a chaotic mess of scar tissue and off-coloured skin.

They assumed that like so many others, the military was what had broken him.

It hadn't, though. Sure, he had nightmares sometimes. Sure, sudden sounds and fireworks instinctively made him duck for cover, the sounds rattling in his head like marbles. Sure, he still slept lightly, ready to launch awake at a command.

But it hadn't broken him. Instead, it had installed a stronger anger, one that burned deeper within, a desire to help those who couldn't help themselves.

He was an outstanding soldier. 

He made an even better spy.

O.W.C.A training was brutal. It was harsh in a way that was familiar and yet painfully grating to Perrin, like something dragged against his skin the wrong way, sandpaper pressed to the bruises and sore muscles he nursed at night before getting up early the next morning to do it again.

Worst of all was that he was good at it. Espionage came easy to someone who was used to staying quiet, and military work had numbed him to the torturous idea of taking another person's life if he had to. He was the perfect student, the perfect agent.

Even perfect agents had black spots on their records, redacted bits that were too painful to recall. Moments that missions hadn’t turned out how they were meant to, for the worse. 

Somehow, though, those are the kinds of events that get seared into your eyelids, burned into your mind. Perry knew his off by heart.

His name had been Leo Hunt. Agent L. He'd been forty one. He'd had a wife. A son and two daughters. A home waiting for him on the west coast.

And if asked, Perrin could recall, in perfect detail, how it had looked when he'd been torn limb from limb. The colour of his blood. The way his eyes had gone from terrified to dull and then to empty. The way their tormenter had laughed. The way he'd died with his baby son's name on his lips.

Perrin remembered it all. His memory was better than most, near perfect even. He had a way of keeping track of things others lacked. Trauma seemed to make his mind even more unwilling to let him forget.

It wasn't this that broke him either. He'd escaped, left the body but taken Leo's ID, his treasures, keepsakes you weren’t supposed to bring on missions but most of them did, to remind them of who their work was for. He'd escaped, gone back to the agency.

He'd stood, eyes somber and body rigid, when they'd told Leo’s wife. He'd presented her with the items. An ID, a small folded photo of the family together, a keychain of memories that must’ve meant something. He let her scream fury at him, let her be angry and exhausted and heartbroken, all at once, all with a look of neutral sadness.

It was fine. He could handle her anger. He'd survived. Her husband hadn't. She had a right to be furious.

But he'd moved on. Taken another mission. Continued with work. Cycled through espionage and information seeking, subtle assassination and removal of threats. Work moved on. Life moved on. He knew people whispered about him, about how he was distant. Detached. His few friends in the organization were scattered worldwide, leaving Perrin with that painful familiar loneliness. The one he’d nursed through childhood, when he’d at least had a family home to go back to. That same loneliness he’d felt when his parents were gone, nearly eclipsed by the overwhelming grief of realizing he’d never see them again. The same loneliness he’d felt through his teens in England, with a family he’d come to love, in a country that wasn’t his, with classmates who thought he was strange. The loneliness he’d fought through his time in the military, that had all but vanished in training, where he had Peter to compete against, Bea to tease him and Zee to put in a sarcastic comment. It was back now, though, drowning him in its grasp, pulling it close and into the depths, his limbs weighed down by grief and guilt.

He knew others whispered. He couldn’t find himself to care.

But that hadn’t broken him. It was the first time a mission has gone so poorly, though. It wasn't the last.

There was the time he went toe to toe with a man who took sadistic pleasure in dipping Perrins arms grated against sandpaper and something like cheese graters, into salt water, had laughed, delighted, while Perrin had screamed silently, his voice long gone after the hours of torture he'd faced.

That hadn't broken him.

There was the man who debated, out loud, the best way to keep Perrins corpse preserved and pretty. The best way to kill him without a mark, so he'd have the pretty teal haired agent forever, to dress up as a doll and puppet for whatever perverted intent he had. 

That hadn't broken him either.

He collected scars, each a mark of tragedy and triumph, each a little heavier than the last. They had dragged him deeper into loneliness and emptiness and nothingness, yes, had weighed him down more than physical injuries did, had reminded him of every failure he had so that his near-perfect memory could replay the tragedies every time he’d closed his eyes.   
But they hadn’t broken him. 

What had broken him was the isolation torture. The criminal had wanted information. She'd been rather clear about that. Perrin would tell her nothing, absolutely nothing. No matter what she’d done, what her army of underlings had done.

He’d faced it with a stony expression, staring her down with a coldness he had mastered.

She pursed her lips and had him thrown in a small, blank room.

He'd been there for four days, with nothing. No contact with the world. No food, or water. No injuries or pain to distract him.

Perrin wondered, sometimes, if he'd ever really left that room. If he was still sitting there, alone, in a silent, empty space. 

It wouldn't surprise him, really. Tracking time was impossible when there was nothing but white walls. It had stretched and warped, bending to where a blink felt like hours and counting felt like seconds. He wouldn't be surprised if the best parts of his life were hallucinations, strange pretends he had made up in there to make himself feel better. 

Perrin remembered repeating his name, over and over again. Spelling it out in sign language, watching his hands move distantly, as if they were someone else's. He remembered the panic when he couldn't remember his middle name, when he started to lose who Perrin Fletcher was. When he could only just barely recall Agent P.

He was used to loneliness, but the empty stillness of that room, the skin crawling fact that he couldn't quite work out if others existed… if there was anyone but him in this night empty world…

It had been what broke him. It had been what made him sink deepest into cold and empty and lonely and alone and broken and internally screaming for someone, anyone to just touch him, talk to him…

Perrin was absolutely sure that if the woman who'd put him there had offered to hug him, talk to him for any secrets about O.W.C.A, he would've agreed in that moment. If she'd offered social connection to switching sides, betraying everything and everyone he believed in, he would've in a heartbeat.

It was the closest he'd ever come to betrayal. The closest he’d ever come to actually destroying everything he’d worked for. To breaking his internal moral code.

His memories of the rescue were blurry and disjointed at best, but he remembered someone picking him up, people talking. Peter’s intense frown, the way his eyes seemed to read concern and annoyance all at once. He remembered the beeping of a hospital machine, the familiar feel of hospital sheets. He remembered turning once, and staring out the window of O.W.C.A’s Europe HQ medical wing, staring at the lights of Lausanne, thinking how pretty they were.

How there were so many people out there, and feeling very small.

It was that event, that horrific nightmare of a capture that had pushed him to apply somewhere else, into someone else, out of his own skin and deep into something he wasn’t sure he could ever surface from. It was that which had convinced him. He didn’t want to be an international agent anymore. It was exhausting. It was crushing.

It had broken him, ultimately. 

He applied for a transfer to the one area he always felt safe. Danville. The Tri-State area, where his cousin lived. The most normal, basic place he could think of that was about as absurd and bizarre as he could dream of. 

It had been a blessing to get accepted. An even larger one that the most dangerous things there barely even scratched the smallest missions he’d done.

He still dreamed of it though. Dreamed of the empty room, the painfully white walls. The fact that the air was neither too hot nor cold. It was so utterly empty, so utterly still. He woke up with a scream in his throat every time, gripping the bed to try to ground himself in the now.

The kids helped, with their easily handed out affection. The fact that none of them minded hugs, none of them minded climbing all over him. How Candace liked it when he braided her hair, and the boys liked it when he put them on his shoulders, letting them reach higher places.

The human contact was a blessing. He craved it, burned for it, and every touch was a little bit of himself coming back. Another reminder that he was human.

That he wasn’t totally alone. 

The military hadn’t broken him. Killing people hadn’t broken him either, neither had the torment that was training to be a secret agent. The sadistic people he went up against didn’t, not even the ones who left him with a network of scars.

No, what had killed him was the time he had nearly convinced himself he was alone. The time he had felt solitude creep up behind him and sink its claws into his shoulders. The time he had nearly forgotten himself, just from the emptiness he’d felt.

It had broken him.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not nice to my characters.  
> Sorry Perry. It'll be okay at some point.


End file.
